bandwidth requirement for carrying out SAP Transactions

This sheet contains a description od SAP's frontend characterstics from
both both LAN & WAN prospectives.

A. Frontend Network Traffic Considerations

a.1 Control Architecture

The amount of data transferred for each Dialog Step depends not only
on complexity of transaction screen.
but also on the number of itemsthat have to be displayed.

a.2 Visual Design of SAP GUI

You van the visual design of SAPGUI at the run-time.
SAPGUI offers two interfaces - 1. Classic GUI and 2. Low Speed
Connection.
the classic GUI displays all graphics at the time run-time, so it will
consume more bandwidth.
Low speed connection displays the GUI or screens without Heavy
graphics that is not mandatory
at the time of run-time.

a.3 Options for Low speed conections

1 Menus are loaded only on demand
2 Backgroud bitmaps are not transferred.
3 The list control transfers only the lines that are visible on the
screen
4 The application can query the flag to react to the network
conditions individually
5 The transfer data set for controls are limited.
6 Field and the input History are not available.
You can use this flag when network bandwidth is an issue.

a.4 Other Bandwidth Consumers

1 Web - Access
2 Printing
3 Electronic Mails
4 File Transfer
5 Others

B NETWORK RESPONSE TIME

Sizing the network bandwidth requirements for SAP Frontend applications
must be distiguished from the
network respose time.

b.1 Mimimal Bandwidth

For the single user or a small no of users the recommended network
bandwidht is 56 kbps
to achive acceptable response time.
b.2 Compitition for bandwidth

SAP recomends using the factor of about 1.5 to compensate for the
statistical effect.
As a thumb rule do not plan total network utilisation higher than 75%.
b.3 Latency

Network Latency is the time which one empty packet of data takes to
travel from the client
to the Server and vise-versa. It is measured in terms of rounds Trips
Time (RTT)
RTT also called the 'Ping Time'

An analogon to the two values that influence network response is

RTT Length of Pipe
Bandwidth Thickness of the Pipe

C Network Load of Individual SAP Application

You can use the figures here for a rough and initial estimation of
possible network load.
However good network Load Desgin demands that you measure the actual
load in system yourself.

The following table displays the numbers of bytes transferred with the
two options in R/3 Enterprise.
LSC for fast Wide Area Networks and LAN Connections. One large
contributor to netwotk load
is GUI design